Celebrity Victims and Wimpy Snowflakes: Using Personal Narratives to Challenge Digitally Mediated Rape Culture

In this chapter we explore two events: the first author’s personal experience of going viral for reporting a sexual assault – and subsequently, having been labeled a “celebrity victim” by a mainstream media outlet; and the second author’s experience of having her feminist academic Twitter profile aggressively trolled for speaking out against rape culture. The Internet presents new forms of mediated spaces where women have created platforms to report their experiences of sexual assault and fight back against gender and sexual violence and rape culture (Rentschler, Fem Media Stud, 15(2): 353–356, 2015), whilst simultaneously offering new, and often anonymous, pathways for misogyny and abuse to proliferate and spread (Ging, The Manosphere’s “toxic technocultures”: social media and the new communicative politics of men’s rights [Invited lecture]. Mediated feminisms: activism and resistance to gender and sexual violence in the digital age, UCL Institute of Education, 2016; Jane, Misogyny online: a short (and brutish) history. Sage, Los Angeles, 2017; Phipps et al., J Gender Stud, https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2016.1266792, 2017). We examine how prominent anti-feminist discourses that undermine discussions of sexual violence online operate and contextualize this discussion in relation to the exacerbation of hate speech surrounding the Donald Trump presidency. We also demonstrate how feminist activism and resistance to rape culture has grown during the Trump era, exploring the connectivity and collectivity enabled through social media platforms. We then hone in on one example of this feminist resistance through a discussion of the Facebook group, Pantsuit Nation, which uses storytelling and narrative approaches to fight back against the normalizing sexual violence, a theme that permeated the U.S. election.